Out of the Melting Pot...

In 1960 not many people would really have argued with the statement that Britain was a white, Christian country. There were people of other races and faiths, and while they might have been considered a curiosity in many areas, they weren't legally barred from anything, there was no segregation and there doesn't appear to have been much violence or vitriol directed towards them. Still very few people would have really argued that Britain was or should be anything other than a white, Christian country.

Even describing Britain as such now could itself be considered a provocative and divisive thing to say, despite the fact that it actually is. According to the 2011 census 87% white and 59%, a majority, identifying themselves as Christian. But that's not the party line - Britain, we are told is a land of diversity, where people of all backgrounds mix and mingle in an intoxicating curry of multiculturalism. Celebrating our superficial differences around our shared values of tolerance, fair play and health spending. There's even a made to match history, where the British are a mongrel race who have for centuries absorbed incomers from across Europe and beyond, bringing their colourful, interesting and exotic ways to our drab isle.

Not a single senior member of any of the three main parties would dispute this, and even the "maverick" Nigel Farage treads very carefully around the subject. Yet it's not really true at all. As we've seen the simple demographics don't stack up, and it still is a predominantly white country, where a majority of the people describe themselves as Christian. Rather this view of Britain as a sort of Ellis Island without the Atlantic in the way is a retrofitted justification for a left wing project to profoundly and permanently change the country.

The history of immigration and integration is a bit more difficult to quantify, but while Britain certainly did provide refuge to Huguenots, Jews and others it was in tiny numbers compared to the industrial scale migration we have had since WW2, and accelerated again since 1997. Anyway this wasn't something unique to Britain - people have moved around Europe, and indeed everywhere, since time began and generally rubbed along ok. It is not a uniquely British phenomenon. It's what people do. Up until relatively recently it was done in tiny numbers and usually out of necessity. Now it is being done on a vast scale, and mostly driven by economic gain on both sides. The migrants get better wages, and employers get a pool of workers to keep wages down. Only the native population lose out through increased wage competition, access to services and their towns and cities being turned into alien places with the high crime and mistrust that comes with a transitory population, disproportionately made up of young men.

But all this diversity is great, many say. It's one of the things that defines Britain, the availability of curry and kebabs in small towns, the opportunity to live with people from exotic and faraway lands and learn about their ways.

This melting pot view is a pure fantasy, invented and imposed on the British people without ever asking them. It appears to be taken wholesale from a romanticised view of 19th century New York, where the 'huddled masses' from Europe arrived with nothing and built exciting and productive lives in the new, young republic. It ignores both the massive racial tensions which this created in New York and beyond, which continue to this day. It ignores the fact that America has since developed a fairly strict immigration policy, which also suggests that this policy was not an unmitigated success. It ignores the very important differences between doing this in a huge, almost empty continent with vast resources, compared to imposing this on an old, settled population in a densely inhabited island. Finally this view doesn't seem to give any consideration to the fact that the United States of the late 19th century was a very harsh place where the onus was almost entirely on the immigrant to sink or swim. Whatever assistance there was came from charity or religious groups, not a vast welfare state with social services, integration programmes and multilingual telephone helplines. Nor did it have the necessary flip side of this - an elaborate and resentment inspiring tax system, hiring quotas for minority groups and far reaching laws against discrimination, or even speech which might be considered derogatory towards a certain group.

All this, combined with the arduous journey across the Atlantic to get there in the first place, means that the huddled masses arriving in 19th century New York were a very different type of migrant to the ones arriving in Britain today, and have an entirely different experience when they arrive. Which makes clinging to the idealistic view of recreating this experiment in 21st century Britain a leap into the unknown, in a vain attempt to attain something that most people don't particularly want anyway, by a means which seems unlikely to attain it.

It's not about being racist, or wishing for some mythical Christian past, the sort of slur that is usually thrown at anyone daring to question this policy. It's about a wrongheaded doctrine being imposed upon the country with no real debate or chance of stopping it, and about a political class with a pathological inability to be honest with the public, or even themselves; yet in the grip of a furious determination to allow no discussion of this cataclysmic change, or dissent from the established orthodoxy on it.

The reality of this experiment so far has been an enormous rift in British society, where we have the Labour party holding election rallies separated by gender to appease Muslims, huge scale postal voting fraud again committed by Muslims. We have British citizens travelling to Syria and elsewhere to fight against our allies in favour of Islamic fundamentalism, absurd levels of often very violent crime in diverse areas and a myriad of other problems grown out of the wholesale importation of millions of people who share no values, history, or often even language with the host population. Yet still our politicians of all parties cling to this orthodoxy and insist that the greatest problem is lack of resources and whites discriminating against non-whites.

Winston Churchill is quoted as saying that a lie gets half way around the world before the truth has a chance to get it's pants on. It was another great Tory, Enoch Powell who told the truth about the multicultural experiment being imposed on the British people from above in 1968, and despite huge popular support this destroyed his political career. His tone, the unfortunate way in which the speech was dubbed "Rivers of Blood" and the general political mood of the time in which he said it meant that the uncomfortable truth he told was caught with it's trousers down. Meanwhile the lie that all our differences are merely skin deep and we will all live side by side without problems if we just legislate against a few racists and bigots has had almost half a century as unchallenged orthodoxy, and the truth is only now starting to catch up.

But catch up it will, because that's what truth does, and the stronger the lie, the more thoroughly embedded the orthodoxy, then the more difficult and problematic will be the resulting correction as we get out of the melting pot of multiculturalism and into the unforgiving fire of reality.